Steganography is the art of hiding information to prevent detection of the presence of the hidden information. Previous methods of steganography have included character arrangements, digital signatures, invisible inks, microdots, covert channels and spread-spectrum communications. A related art, cryptography, scrambles messages so they cannot be understood; steganography, however, hides the messages so that they cannot be seen. Conventional computerized steganography tools and software have been developed to embed information in images and other digital information using various computing platforms, software and algorithms. These tools have been developed to function with both lossy and lossless data compression algorithms and to select among various embedding schemes depending on the subject information (i.e., the cover data), the embedded information (i.e., the message), or both. Embedding digital copyright information and watermarks in multimedia data are two examples of current steganography tools and methods.
Digital photography is one area of technology that has recently experienced growth in both popularity and capability. As a result, many individuals and businesses are acquiring large numbers of images that need to be managed and stored. Meta-data, or auxiliary data describing or related to an image or other subject data, is typically used to facilitate the storage and management of subject data. Use of this meta-data allows images to be cataloged, stored, arranged, indexed, searched and retrieved by various methods related to their content and other related information.
Conventional digital imaging methods involve first acquiring a database of different images which are then subsequently processed, one-by-one, to identify and attach meta-data for each image. These conventional methods lead to errors in remembering and identifying meta-data because of the time-lapse between acquiring an image and specifying the appropriate meta-data. These methods also require separate database fields or tables of meta-data that need to be entered, indexed, stored, and maintained separately from the subject data (e.g., images) that the meta-data describes.
A need, therefore, exists for electronic devices that acquire subject, or cover, data to also acquire meta-data corresponding with the subject data and to associate the subject data and the meta-data in an error-free and efficient manner that reduces the resources needed for the storage and management of the subject data. The association of subject data and the meta-data also needs to be accomplished without discernible degradation or attenuation of the subject data.